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Some comments on past articles warning against telling children that learning is easy and that rewards are "bad" led me to write this. At the core of this article is the question of how beliefs affect performance and how we can change beliefs.

It is at the same time obvious and subtle. In the heat of the teaching moment, some teachers and parents may forget to monitor and nurture the optimistic beliefs in children. In this post we'll cover some research from the aclaimed book "Mindset" as well as concepts from the fields of motivation, behaviourism, personality, and learning.

We start with a simple concept, rather an observation: Many people would like to fly, yet we see very few people galloping with flapping arms like clumsy albatross. Take a second to ponder why. Most of us could come up with the right answer, which is that people cannot fly by flapping their arms. It just can't happen, and we know it. Therefore we don't try. How simple.

Yet this simple bit of knowledge has profound consequences for children. It can mean the difference between stunted intellectual growth and a mind free of restraint.

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It's common practice nowadays to pooh-pooh punishment in favour of never-ending positivity, which for most people brings to mind rewards and encouragement. The truth is that rewards can also be highly damaging, destroying motivation and create the very opposite behaviour that parent's are trying to nurture. It isn't nearly as simple as chosing one over the other. Below I give the rules-of-thumb to use rewards effectively.

Conditioning, using rewards and punishment, is a very basic form of psychological behaviour modification that you can use to teach (or program if you will) worms, dogs, and humans. The prerequisite is a nervous system, and maybe not even that. The good thing about that is that it works even with small babies!

When I wrote the punishment article, some people thought that I meant beatings or groundings. I simply meant anything that the child dislikes. Similarly, rewards are anything the child likes or wants more of. Candy, money, watching a movie, toys, a kind word, an exciting outing, are all examples of rewards.